Doing the Dog

Last weekend I had just finished writing a post about this topic, when the blog site went down for routine maintenance I had forgotten about and I lost the whole thing. I was so disheartened that I never got round to rewriting it – then over the last two days it started hitting the world newspapers. So, here I go again.

There was an article in the local rag which caught my attention. It seems that Liuzhou’s government decided to hold a food festival and they nominated three local dishes as being typical Liuzhou cuisine. Not surprisingly, the first was Luosifen, the local variety of rice noodles, served in a spicy snail soup. The second was offal in general and the third was Dog Hot Pot. They had decided that promoting the local specialities would attract more tourism.

This took place just as a proposal was put to China’s legislature proposing a total ban on eating dog (and cat). This proposal is what hit the western news media, as well as being discussed in the Chinese media.

Local web forum site, Hongdou carried out a survey of the locals and found that 53% were against the proposed ban, with 31% in favour. The remainder didn’t care one way or the other. There is a strong local tradition of eating dog hotpot in the winter.

In the meantime, the dog restaurants are still doing good business and the market stalls are still selling dog meat. I can’t see this proposal coming to anything.